Triptych (fresh)

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First edition 1978

Triptych. Three scenic pictures is a drama by the Swiss writer Max Frisch . It was written between 1976 and 1979. The first version was broadcast on April 15, 1979 as a radio play directed by Walter Adler . It was premiered on October 9, 1979 in the Center dramatique de Lausanne, directed by Michel Soutter . After a revision in December 1979, the final version was premiered on February 1, 1981 in the Akademietheater in Vienna under the direction of Erwin Axer .

Triptych shows encounters between the living and the dead in three pictures . The first picture shows a memorial service observed by the deceased. In the realm of the dead in the second picture, all people who were connected in their life meet again. Their encounter, however, remains caught in the repetition of what has been. In the third picture there is a communication between a living person and a dead person who once fell in love at the funeral service.

content

The first picture

Matthis Proll, a seventy-year-old antiquarian, has passed away. At his funeral, he sits in his rocking chair, unnoticed by the living, and watches the scene. A pastor preaches about the resurrection of Lazarus and the unbelieving Thomas . A young man named Roger proclaims that Proll never believed in life after death , and the other mourners fell silent when he spoke. Only a young woman named Francine comes up to him and they talk animatedly. A late mourning guest named Luchsinger, who goes to sticks, is embarrassed and reveals himself to be a childhood friend of the deceased.

The widow is the only one who can see the deceased. As soon as she is alone with him, she speaks to him while he just remains silent. She defends the pastor's invitation and complains to the dead man that he has left her. On his last evening he sent her away to be alone and died. She can't get over the fact that after 26 years of marriage he told her to her face that she was intellectually unsympathetic to him. When she returns after saying goodbye to the mourners, the rocking chair is empty. She calls Proll in vain.

The second picture

Proll stands on a wide, empty, white surface and is fishing even though there is no river. Other dead are also here, but everyone only sees the people they have met in life. The pastor walks around between them and asks the people why they died. He, who always put all people off to the hereafter, cannot understand that he no longer holds an office in this. A clochard comments on the scenery with literary quotations. Once a celebrated actor, he has lived since a breakdown feeling like he was carrying a corpse. A policeman practices on a flute without a break, but makes the same mistake every time because he is no longer able to learn as a dead man. A pilot sits as if in the cockpit seconds before a bomb exploded in his plane, looking for his course. Later he finds his deceased child and plays ball with him endlessly.

Proll meets a gas station attendant who turns out to be his father. Already died at the age of 41, he is now much younger than his son, but he still wants to teach him. Proll's mother is an old woman who only came to life after her husband's death. But when asked if she would like to live again, she waves it away. Proll's daughter Ilse complains that she could never talk to her father. Her boyfriend, a bank clerk, did not marry her because her father was a " red " man. Then he was shot dead by a bank robber who said he had improved in custody. However, a year before his release, he died of a prison accident. The childhood friend on sticks appears again. He once slandered Proll as a Stalinist . Now he wants to make up with him in vain.

Then there is Katrin, a young mannequin that Proll loved in his last years. After a relationship crisis she found refuge in his second-hand bookshop and called him "little father". The men in her life appear one after the other: Klas, who thought he was happy with her, but constantly criticized her for little things. Xaver, with whom she shared a love that only hurt both, and who was driven to his death during a military exercise. Jonas, whose revolutionary conviction impressed her. He died when the policeman shot into the crowd during a demonstration, for which he still sees God and not himself responsible. When Katrin finally lost her curiosity about her life, she took an overdose of sleeping pills.

The third picture

The dead Francine and the living Roger meet again on a bench in Paris at night under the light of a street lamp. After meeting at Proll's funeral and subsequently falling in love, their love seemed to both of them like that of the first couple, a couple who are able to think about the world differently. But in Roger the impression grew stronger that Francine's love was for love itself and not for him. And Francine never really felt recognized and accepted by him. When Roger separated from her, she became seriously ill and died, for which those around him blamed him. His subsequent relationship overshadowed the memory of Francine, now he's divorced.

In the end, they spoke up and said everything that remained to be said. Roger still encourages Francine to continue speaking, but only repetitions come from the dead. Her last words are that he never loved her and is unable to love. Roger comments that this will remain so. He pulls out a revolver, presses it to his temple, then goes out the light. When it gets light again, the bench is empty.

shape

The title of Frisch's drama refers to the triptych , a form of three-part painting or winged altar in which the side images are usually narrower than the dominant central image. In Frisch's drama, too, the second picture is much more extensive and has more staff than the two “side pictures”, whereby, according to Frisch, the individual pictures “are not stations of a dramatic plot, but rather give three scenic aspects on the subject”. The symmetry of the three-part picture can be traced down to the last detail: the two border pictures play in the world of the living, but refer to the dead world of the central picture. They are mirrored in their figure constellation, in that in the first picture a woman calls her deceased husband, in the third picture the sexes are reversed.

History of origin

Max Frisch rehearsing in Andorra in 1961

After the drama Biography: Frisch had withdrawn from the stage for ten years and only wrote prose . According to his own statements, he had reached a dead end with his theater work. In retrospect, the parables of Biedermann and the Arsonists and Andorra already contained too much didactics for Frisch, something that was not even close to his heart. He was also able to do the so-called “dramaturgy of permutation” in his biography: not successfully implementing a game , so that in the end he “really didn't feel like going to the theater” and turned away completely from the stage. On the other hand, Frisch's last story, Montauk, was for him, in his own words, a “ point of no return ” from which there was no longer any possibility of an open or hidden form of autobiography . Therefore, with the following work he sought the way into fiction .

In the spring of 1976, Frisch began working on a new text in the studio of his friend Gottfried Honegger in Gockhausen , which at that time was not planned as a new play, but as a dialogue . Originally, the whole text should consist of the second part, the life of the dead in a world of Hades . Independently of this, Frisch wrote a second piece about an encounter between the living and the dead, from which the third picture later emerged. As the juxtaposition of the two pictures seemed too antipodal , Frisch put an opening picture in front of it, the first draft of which by Walter Schmitz is dated November 1977. Just one day after the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade , Frisch read an early version of the second picture in public under the title Easter in 1976 .

A total of five drafts were created for the first image, which in its early stages differed greatly from the final version, and ten drafts for the third image, the structure of which remained roughly the same. Here, in particular, the speaking shares shifted from Francine to Roger. Frisch's main work, however, concentrated on the second picture, of which there are a total of thirteen drafts, of which the first ten still have the working title Styx before the title was changed to Triptych . The processing of the second picture consisted mainly of reducing the original material. In particular, Frisch deleted motivic links and literary allusions that had been incorporated in the meantime in order to keep the text more open in its interpretation. An early version revolved around a statue of Hermes that brought the dead into Hades. The dead Francine originally made a brief appearance in the second picture.

The first version of the completed piece was published in March 1978 by Suhrkamp Verlag . Max Frisch blocked the play against performances in the theater because, as he explained, after his long absence from the stage he wanted to avoid the "whole market hype" of a premiere. The press, however, speculated that the manuscript had previously been rejected by various major theaters. It was not until a year later that the text was implemented for the first time, but not on stage, but in a radio play adaptation by Walter Adler , which was broadcast on April 15, 1979, an Easter Sunday. It was premiered on October 9, 1979 at the Center dramatique de Lausanne, directed by Michel Soutter , a film director who had previously only gained experience with a stage play. Corinne Coderey played the Francine, Roger Jendly played the Roger. Alexander Stephan rated this performance as a test performance as well as the following production by Erwin Axer at the Warsaw Modern Theater.

Afterwards, Frisch revised the text again in December 1979, whereby his changes were predominantly purely stylistic. The revised version appeared the following year in the book series Spectaculum and from the 4th edition in 1981 also in the edition suhrkamp . Before that, in December 1980, the planned German-language premiere at the Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt failed due to the intervention of the ensemble, who saw the piece “narrowed down too much to a private or almost everyday perspective”. As a result, Frisch complained about the participation of "rascals" and "ideology actors", to whom he did not intend to explain why he was not a reactionary. The German-language premiere, including the premiere hype, finally took place on February 1, 1981 in the Akademietheater in Vienna again under the direction of Erwin Axer. The Francine gave Elisabeth Orth , the Roger Joachim Bißmeier .

reception

The book edition of Triptychon was hesitantly received by the press in the spring of 1978. It took a few months for around 25 reviews to appear. In some major newspapers such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Frisch's latest work was not even discussed. Walter Schmitz suspected a feeling of incompetence among both theater and literary critics towards a play that was not staged. In contrast to the author's earlier work - most recently with the Montauk short story - there were no debates about the work; it was generally received with very restrained approval, in which there were no positive or negative voices. The critics often brought Frisch's age into play, using terms such as “age style” and “age wisdom”. Triptychon received the greatest approval, also unusual for Frisch's work history, in his home country, Switzerland.

For Hellmuth Karasek , Frisch told “wisely about love and death, especially about the death of love.” With “unsentimental accuracy” he provided “theatrical proof against life after death”, while “giving today's disturbed Biedermeier the usual consolations of death gently beating around the ears ”. Rolf Michaelis described: “Here no white-haired writer ponders the afterlife and transience, but still and quite calmly about life, our life.” Peter von Matt finally saw triptych as a piece of an “existentialiste défroqué”, a runaway existentialist who years ago "lost faith in the total moment, in the ecstasy of freedom that is always possible as long as one lives".

According to Urs Bircher, the press reacted “cautiously” to the later performances, and according to Alexander Stephans “neutral to biting”. On the occasion of the Lausanne premiere in 1979, Rudolf Maurer described: "The director Michel Soutter was faced with the difficult task of making the banality, rigidity and hopelessness of the depicted world of the dead visible in this play, without continuous action, without spreading boredom." The Basler Zeitung criticized, that Soutter could hardly cope with the “bulky piece”.

On the occasion of the German-language premiere in Vienna in 1981, Peter von Becker spoke of "chic school radio" and "philosophy in the boutique", Lothar Schmidt-Mühlisch of a piece "that wants to be identical with its thematic insignificance". Other voices compared the piece with Thornton Wilder's Our Little Town , Jean-Paul Sartre's Closed Society or texts by Jean Giraudoux without Frisch reaching the role models. Benjamin Henrichs doubted that the triptych is "more than a strangely late and withered descendant of post-war theater, as pale as the characters and states of which it is about". On the other hand, Peter Iden saw "a great, touching play." Joachim Kaiser judged that the triptych "belongs as an exciting commitment to Frisch's oeuvre like any of his significant texts."

literature

Text output

  • Max Frisch: Triptych. Three scenic pictures . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1978 (first edition).
  • Max Frisch: Triptych. Three scenic pictures. In: Spectaculum 33.Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 3-518-09104-2 (first edition of the second version).
  • Max Frisch: Triptych. Three scenic pictures. In: Collected works in chronological order. Seventh volume . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-06533-5 , pp. 93-204.

Secondary literature

  • Michael Butler Paint the demons on the wall. In: text + kritik 47/48, 3rd expanded edition 1983, ISBN 3-88377-140-6 , pp. 88-107.
  • Heinz Gockel: Max Frisch. Drama and dramaturgy . Oldenbourg, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-486-88271-6 , pp. 110-116.
  • Jürgen H. Petersen: Max Frisch . Metzler, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-476-13173-4 , pp. 160-168.
  • Walter Schmitz : Max Frisch: Das Spätwerk (1962–1982) . An introduction. Francke, Tübingen 1985, ISBN 3-7720-1721-5 , pp. 126-142.
  • Walter Schmitz: To Max Frisch: Triptych. Three scenic pictures (1978). In: Gerhard P. Knapp (Ed.): Max Frisch. Aspects of the stage work . Peter Lang, Bern 1979, ISBN 3-261-03071-2 , pp. 401-424.
  • Cornelia Steffahn: Aging, dying and death in Max Frisch's late work . Dr. Kovač, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-8300-0249-1 , pp. 112-155.
  • Alexander Stephan : Max Frisch . Beck, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-406-09587-9 , pp. 126-134.
  • Alexander von Bormann: Theater as an Existential Experience? Max Frisch's turn to Christian amateur play. In: Gerhard P. Knapp (Ed.): Max Frisch. Aspects of the stage work , pp. 425–436.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Walter Schmitz: Max Frisch: Das Spätwerk (1962–1982) , p. 126.
  2. ↑ Cornelia Steffahn: Aging, dying and death in the late work of Max Frisch , pp. 113–114.
  3. ↑ Urs Bircher: With the exception of friendship: Max Frisch 1956–1991 . Limmat, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-85791-297-9 , p. 202.
  4. ↑ a b Farewell to the biography . Conversation between Peter Rüedi and Max Frisch in Die Weltwoche on April 19, 1978. Reprinted in: Luis Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max frisch . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-39734-6 , pp. 248, 250.
  5. ↑ Urs Bircher: With the exception of friendship: Max Frisch 1956–1991 , p. 203.
  6. ↑ Alexander Stephan: Max Frisch. P. 126.
  7. ↑ Cornelia Steffahn corrects Walter Schmitz's data here. Cornelia Steffahn: Aging, dying and death in Max Frisch's late work , pp. 112–113.
  8. ↑ See the different versions: Walter Schmitz: Max Frisch: Das Spätwerk (1962–1982) , pp. 134–140.
  9. ↑ Max Frisch: Collected works in chronological order. Seventh volume , p. 499.
  10. ↑ a b Alexander Stephan: Max Frisch. P. 127.
  11. ↑ Max Frisch: Collected works in chronological order. Seventh Volume , pp. 499-500.
  12. ↑ Alexander Stephan: Max Frisch. Pp. 127-128.
  13. ↑ a b Alexander Stephan: Max Frisch. P. 128.
  14. ↑ Max Frisch: Collected works in chronological order. Seventh volume , p. 500.
  15. ^ Walter Schmitz: To Max Frisch: Triptychon. Three scenic pictures (1978). Pp. 401-403.
  16. ↑ Hellmuth Karasek : Sage of love and death . In the mirror . April 10, 1978.
  17. ↑ Rolf Michaelis : Now he's singing again . In: The time . April 28, 1978.
  18. ↑ Peter von Matt : Max Frisch's multiple Hadesfahrten. In: New Rundschau . 79, 1978, No. 4, p. 605. Quoted from: Alexander Stephan: Max Frisch. P. 134.
  19. ↑ a b Urs Bircher: With the exception of friendship: Max Frisch 1956–1991. P. 208.
  20. ↑ Rudolf Maurer: Unselige Totenwelt. World premiere of MF's triptych in Lausanne. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . October 12, 1979. Quoted from: Urs Bircher: With the exception of friendship: Max Frisch 1956–1991. P. 208.
  21. ↑ Peter von Becker: The truth, the rescue in the last picture? In: Theater heute 1981, issue 3, p. 17. Quoted from: Alexander Stephan: Max Frisch. P. 128.
  22. ↑ Lothar Schmidt-Mühlisch: "I am no longer curious" In: Die Welt from February 3, 1981. Quoted from: Alexander Stephan: Max Frisch. Pp. 128-129.
  23. ↑ Alexander Stephan: Max Frisch. P. 129.
  24. ↑ Benjamin Henrichs : The future belongs to fear . In: Die Zeit of February 13, 1981.
  25. ↑ Peter Iden : What counts is what we live. In: Frankfurter Rundschau of February 4, 1981. Quoted from: Michael Butler: Painting the demons on the wall , p. 89.
  26. ↑ Joachim Kaiser : Not death, what is deadly is murderous. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of February 3, 1981. Quoted from: Michael Butler: Painting the demons on the wall , p. 89.